‘Just a lowly constable?’

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘Sure you are,’ she said.

She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives – they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.

‘Go get some sleep,’ I said. ‘But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.’

‘And what do think I should tell him?’

‘Tell him you fell asleep in your car – jet lag.’

‘Hardly the image the bureau likes to project,’ she said.

‘What do you care what Kittredge thinks?’ I said. ‘Where’re you staying?’

‘Holiday Inn,’ said Reynolds and pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. ‘Earls Court.’

‘Have you got your own transport?’

‘A rental,’ she said. Of course she had – how else had she followed me?

‘Will you be all right driving in this snow?’

She found that hilarious. ‘This isn’t snow,’ she said. ‘Where I’m from you know you have snow when you can’t find your car the next morning.’

I was tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of Zach’s bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.

‘Where the fuck are we?’ asked Zach as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. ‘And whose is that?’

‘My governor’s,’ I said. ‘Don’t even look at it.’

‘That’s a Mark 2,’ he said.

‘You’re still looking at it,’ I said. ‘I told you not to.’

With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then I considered what was likely to happen if I left Zach alone with six grand’s worth of portable electronics – my personal six grand at that.

I opened the back door and ushered him in – watching him closely as he crossed the threshold, I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were ‘inimical’ to certain people but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for the hanging of sou’westers, oilskins, capes and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.

‘You know this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,’ he said.